Since Rose has always been my least favorite of the Rutherford women, my hopes for her story weren't all that high, even given the mystique of a secret marriage. I didn't expect to find this so utterly disappointing, though. Other reviewers are correct when they mention how thinly drawn the women are in this book, and the plot requires epic levels of willful blindness and stupidity on the hero's part, but the final straw, for me, was the confrontation between Thomas and the villain.

I certainly understand that Thomas' situation has taught him how powerless other people can feel, but in no way has the villain experienced anything approaching slavery. Almost all people from this time and place in history had very few choices in their lives. Even the very wealthy, if they cared at all about the people on their land, weren't free to leave the country to do whatever they wanted. But they still weren't slaves.

They weren't bought and sold. They weren't forbidden from leaving a patch of land or whipped if they tried. They didn't have masters. Or shackles. Or the daily awareness that no one thought of them as anything more than useful animals. Did they live in an inequitable society? Yes. Was changing their lot or improving the lives of their family extremely difficult? Yes. But they were not slaves.

And this villain? This privileged person who had more choices than 90% of the people of the time, even if those choices weren't perfect? This person is absolutely not a slave. And furthermore, clearly doesn't care about all the less fortunate people they trampled on the way to achieving their goals.

Thomas isn't portrayed as any kind of intellectual giant, but the allowance he makes for the villain because he sees his own experience as a slave inside them is patently absurd. Perhaps you should think of all the women in your life, Thomas, who have no legal standing. Or your fellow sailors, impressed and then enslaved alongside you because the villain spurned your request for aid. Or the boy supporting his family, whose proximity to you put him in danger. These people deserve your consideration, and instead you're offering clemency to someone who will go on to hurt more people whenever it's convenient for them.

Had Thomas seen beyond his own experiences into the wider world, beyond his surface similarities with the villain to the deeper ones in every other person around him, the book could've redeemed at least some of the bad characterization and lazy plotting. Obviously, it did not. I may have found Rose tiresome and frequently selfish in the previous books, but she deserved a better story than this.